


Kite Fights

by Senri



Category: Xiaolin Showdown (Cartoon)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-05
Updated: 2011-11-05
Packaged: 2017-10-25 17:32:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/272932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Senri/pseuds/Senri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chase and Omi traveling in a far-off city, in some indeterminate AU future.  More frivolous battles.  Gen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kite Fights

The kites lift up like leaves; find slipstream breezes and win them over and rise upon them until they brush at the verge of the bright skyline. Omi runs briefly with his own kite, releases it. The string cuts at his fingers. It takes to the air like it was born to fly, not coaxed together out of wood and silk.

Chase hasn't indulged in this youthful pastime in many times the handful of years that Omi has been alive. But he watches, anyway. Omi stands on the edge of the rooftop, balancing nimble as a cat, head shorn and robes saffron gold. He's no child of air, but he's good at this. Then again, air is a little like water. Both have currents. Both flow.

Omi's blood smears the kite string ruddy. He steers his kite towards the others, yanking the string so taut it near twangs, shouting when he maneuvers well enough that another boy's string gives way and enemy kite flies free and without direction, to land somewhere in the city.

The boy is laughing, bright and fierce. Chase breathes cumin and smog, corruption and the lively bloodstream of the city. Omi's kite darts like a swallow, dips beneath another, unleashes and defeats it. "Do you want to try?" Omi thinks to ask, generous, but he blinks with surprise when Chase takes the string from him after all.

It's been a long time, and kite flying is frivolous enough that Chase isn't in practice - if he ever flew kites, his body doesn't remember the skill. But he always fights to win, and he looses three other kites before one swoops down on him, agile enough to beat him out and cut his string.

Omi jumps up and down and cheers for him, and covers shudders sympathetically when defeat is imminent. Chase reels in the remaining string and looks at the frayed end, almost rueful, definitely irritable. He does not like losing. His fingers come away bloody like Omi's, cut by the ground glass coating the cord, and he glares out at the city. How impossible it would be, to find the boy at the end of that kite, the one that beat him. It's pointless anyway. This is a game, nothing important.

Chase's companion stands on the roof-edge. His feet peep out over a narrow alley, a long fall broken only by clotheslines and laundry. Omi shades his eyes and peers out after his errant kite. "I don't think it landed," he says. "It must still be flying!"

Unlikely, Chase thinks. But in the russet evening, the dome of the sky turning monk-robe-saffron-gold overhead, it's impossible to say that it's impossible.


End file.
